C&C my website

MikeAldrich

I've had my website up for a while now and am planning on revamping it this week. I think I'll probably leave the layout the same or at least similar, but I'm defiantly gonna update a lot of the photo's, as well as, add a wildlife section. I'm also gonna add a shopping cart for prints, greeting cards and these sweet drink coasters and magnets I make with tiles and my prints.

I want it to be an online portfolio of sorts, just something I can direct people to if they wanna see my work. I did the whole thing in Dreamweaver, I was thinking of switching to a blog type site or smugmug but I really love the control I have in Dreamweaver, plus I just don't have much time to learn new software.

A bit on my background... After I graduated college (Associates in Photography), I worked as a youth sports photographer for 5 years before moving down to Florida. Photo work has been terribly difficult to find in my area and I have spent the past 3 years working for a waste diversion company, with a few photo gig's here and there. I have spend much of my time in between gig's shooting landscapes, sunsets and wildlife, something there is never a lack of in S.W. Florida. While I have found the road to becoming a professional photographer a very difficult one, I don't wanna give up hope.

Anyway, here's the link:
http://www.mikealdrichphotography.com/index.htm

-Mike

denisegoldberg

The first thing I noticed is how slowly your home page painted. Then as I went into a gallery and clicked to show a photo, I could see the photo paint in stages, top piece, then a little more, a little more, etc. The painting behavior is very noticeable and annoying enough to make me close the site immediately. If you are trying to present yourself as a professional this does not help.

If your about me page isn't available then remove the link.

--- Denise

MikeAldrich

denisegoldberg wrote: »

The first thing I noticed is how slowly your home page painted. Then as I went into a gallery and clicked to show a photo, I could see the photo paint in stages, top piece, then a little more, a little more, etc. The painting behavior is very noticeable and annoying enough to make me close the site immediately. If you are trying to present yourself as a professional this does not help.

If your about me page isn't available then remove the link.

--- Denise

Good to know, I didn't realize my images loaded slowly. Is anyone else having this same problem with my images loading? Does anyone have an idea of why this could be and how I can correct it?

That's for the feedback Denise.

jarboedoggart

1. I LOVE the logo on the front page. You should make a similar (only horizontal) logo for your header. Compared to the landing page, the header on the main page looks amateur.

2. When I click pictures in the galleries, the picture that comes up is still tiny. Certainly bigger than the thumbnail, but still only a few hundred pixels. That needs to stretch to almost the whole screen. Also, the background when viewing the pictures is gray, should be black to match the rest of the site.

3. I did notice the loading of the pictures, but not sure how much it really bothered me. I am not to sure what could be done about that. Certainly, something a bit slicker using flash or HTML5 would be a big improvement. Maybe slide shows for your galleries instead of the thumbnails. Not sure.

In my opinion, the basics are very good, we just need to tweak it and dress it up a little.

MikeAldrich

jarboedoggart wrote: »

1. I LOVE the logo on the front page. You should make a similar (only horizontal) logo for your header. Compared to the landing page, the header on the main page looks amateur.

2. When I click pictures in the galleries, the picture that comes up is still tiny. Certainly bigger than the thumbnail, but still only a few hundred pixels. That needs to stretch to almost the whole screen. Also, the background when viewing the pictures is gray, should be black to match the rest of the site.

3. I did notice the loading of the pictures, but not sure how much it really bothered me. I am not to sure what could be done about that. Certainly, something a bit slicker using flash or HTML5 would be a big improvement. Maybe slide shows for your galleries instead of the thumbnails. Not sure.

In my opinion, the basics are very good, we just need to tweak it and dress it up a little.

Thanks Nate. I was thinking the same thing on the gray backgrounds and the size of the images (they were cropped as 4x6's), I'll have to resize them appropriately. As for flash, I just don't know that much about it. I understand what is does, just not how to create it. I haven't even heard of html5, so I guess I'll have to google that one too. I suppose it's time to catch up with technology, heck I'm still using Dreamweaver 2004. All in all, great advice, now I have some researching to do. Thanks for your time, much appreciated!

-Mike

Hikin' Mike

While I love the Tunnel View/Logo on your splash page, lose it. For me it's a wasted click. I want to see what you do and where your located on the home page. Besides, it better for SEO....unless you don't care about that.

After I clicked your splash page, there is really nothing there to "WOW" me. The blue box around your banner really hurts my eyes. Black background and blue is hard to read/look at. Again, no text at all. There's a bunch of wasted space below your thumbnails too. I would change your banner/logo and use the "logo" from your splash page though. Maybe not include the picture logo though.

Since I prefer landscape photography, I checked out your Landscape gallery. I don't care for your current gallery set-up. I would like to see a description for each picture. I would also include a full navigation structure on EACH page.

You might want to read my SEO for the Photographer link in my sig.

EDIT: I didn't have any issues with load time, but I only looked at the Landscape gallery.

MikeAldrich

Hikin' Mike wrote: »

While I love the Tunnel View/Logo on your splash page, lose it. For me it's a wasted click. I want to see what you do and where your located on the home page. Besides, it better for SEO....unless you don't care about that.

After I clicked your splash page, there is really nothing there to "WOW" me. The blue box around your banner really hurts my eyes. Black background and blue is hard to read/look at. Again, no text at all. There's a bunch of wasted space below your thumbnails too. I would change your banner/logo and use the "logo" from your splash page though. Maybe not include the picture logo though.

Since I prefer landscape photography, I checked out your Landscape gallery. I don't care for your current gallery set-up. I would like to see a description for each picture. I would also include a full navigation structure on EACH page.

You might want to read my SEO for the Photographer link in my sig.

EDIT: I didn't have any issues with load time, but I only looked at the Landscape gallery.

Thanks so much for the SEO suggestions, I'm gonna look into that a little more in depth, I have a basic understanding but your tutorial is pretty awesome. The way I handled that on my site was typing all the keywords I wanted to describe my site on the very top of the page above my banner. I used the same color font to match the background color, this way it could be read by the search engines but it's not noticeable to anyone viewing the page.

As for the blue box around my banner, I have no idea why it would show up like that, it certainly isn't part of my site or something I created. I didn't use any blue boxes. This is one thing that worries me about doing my website on my own is these little glitches that look fine on my end but may cause problems for other viewers. The blue box is a great example, your the only one that has ever mentioned it. Also, Denise having problems with slow loading images, so much so that she just close the site and gave up, that isn't consistent with other viewers. It makes me reconsider possibly switching over to one of the blog type sites that seem so popular, but again, I do like having total control over everything.

I do agree with having a full nav bar on each page as well as adding a bit of text to the images, perhaps location and camera settings. Thanks again Mike.

Hikin' Mike

The blue box must be a Chrome thing. I checked your site with FF and I don't see it.

I would try to hide your text like that. Google "Black Hat Tricks SEO".

MikeAldrich

Hikin' Mike wrote: »

The blue box must be a Chrome thing. I checked your site with FF and I don't see it.

I would try to hide your text like that. Google "Black Hat Tricks SEO".

Hmmm... I wonder why it would show differently in chrome?

I'm guessing you meant to type "wouldn't" instead of would about my hidden text. According to your link my hidden text is referred to as Black Hat and frowned upon in the SEO community. Why would this be unethical? I, admittedly, know very little about SEO's, this "hidden text" they mention is actually a technique I learned in school years ago. What's the difference between what I did and entering the info in code?

Molotov Everything

Hidden text is frowned upon by google basically because so many people would fill the entire background of some pages with hundreds of keywords related to all kinds of things just to get rankings whether or not they have anything to do with the actual site content. So while your invisible text might actually be relevant to the site, it could be interpreted as spam by google and end up doing more harm than good for you.

denisegoldberg

MikeAldrich wrote: »

...The way I handled that on my site was typing all the keywords I wanted to describe my site on the very top of the page above my banner. I used the same color font to match the background color, this way it could be read by the search engines but it's not noticeable to anyone viewing the page.

That technique is frowned upon by search engines. From http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353:

Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors.

--- Denise

Hikin' Mike

MikeAldrich wrote: »

Hmmm... I wonder why it would show differently in chrome?

I'm guessing you meant to type "wouldn't" instead of would about my hidden text. According to your link my hidden text is referred to as Black Hat and frowned upon in the SEO community. Why would this be unethical? I, admittedly, know very little about SEO's, this "hidden text" they mention is actually a technique I learned in school years ago. What's the difference between what I did and entering the info in code?

Yep, my mistake.

Hikin' Mike

MikeAldrich wrote: »

Hmmm... I wonder why it would show differently in chrome?

When you created your logo table, you some how added the 'bordercolor=#0000CC' color as a border.

MikeAldrich

Molotov Everything wrote: »

Hidden text is frowned upon by google basically because so many people would fill the entire background of some pages with hundreds of keywords related to all kinds of things just to get rankings whether or not they have anything to do with the actual site content. So while your invisible text might actually be relevant to the site, it could be interpreted as spam by google and end up doing more harm than good for you.

Oh yes, I see how that can be misleading now. I'm certainly gonna put that on my list of changes. I'm sure glad I made this thread, I'm learning quite a bit about my website.

MikeAldrich

Hikin' Mike wrote: »

When you created your logo table, you some how added the 'bordercolor=#0000CC' color as a border.

Good catch Mike! Still, why do you suppose it would show up in Chrome and not FF?

Hikin' Mike

MikeAldrich wrote: »

Good catch Mike! Still, why do you suppose it would show up in Chrome and not FF?

It's not showing up in Opera either. Not sure really. Usually IE is the one that "doesn't play nice with other browsers".